The Forgotten War with Mexico: The Legacy of Occupation, Annexation and Oppression
In the current US immigration political fight, conservatives are building walls, caging people in immigration detention centers and deporting communities in droves. While conservatives are hurting immigrant communities with anti-immigrant laws and policies, liberal politicians are combating anti-immigrant sentiments with discussions around reasonable pathways to citizenship. What isn’t talked about is the reality that the land owned in the US is stolen land and the borders carved by war. The very people being arrested, caged and deported may be the decedents of people who lived on the land before it was taken by Spanish colonization and well before taken by the US in the Mexican-American War. Why have Americans forgotten that Native Nations in the US were slaughtered, that the Southwest was stolen by war, and land not owned by white people taken? Why isn’t an occupation and apartheid lens to the US Mexico boarder not used in mainstream political discourse? While these questions may seem outrageous and extreme to some, I find it outrageous that people have forgotten or never learned their history, their legacy and their ancestry.
Though this essay focuses on the experiences of Mexican American’s whose families were crossed by the border in 1848, I want to explicitly acknowledge and honor the experiences of Native American communities and recognize the vicious and oppressive treatment of Native American people faced in the US for generations. This essay urges liberal, progressive and radical leaning people to remember colonization and war and not shy away from history when disusing immigration, structural racism, land occupation and institutional power.
The Legacy of the Forgotten War with Mexico
My family and I are Mexican American, however, we did not immigrate to the US, the border crossed us. My family has been in San Diego and the greater southwest region before it was US and even before it was Mexico. While my family does not know its exact indigenous ancestry, they know that they have significant indigenous ancestry from southern California and Baja California.
As a fifth generation Mexican American, connecting to Mexico and Mexicano culture has been hard for me and many of the younger people in my family. Spanish is mostly lost, traditions abandoned and history forgotten. Poverty and hardship are constant but strong Mexican culture and closeness to the land and community persist. While they own no land, my family refuses to move due to a deep connection to the region. The only thing my family does own are graves in the catholic cemetery, where my entire family is buried on both sides, going back generations.
Stories of past colonization, land grabs and lost culture are part of my family history told at reunions and hinted at in old photos. Yet, the stories never included the forces behind the family history. How did Nana’s family loose their land after 1850? Why was Papa brought up in a Spanish Mission orphanage and what language was he forced not to speak and culture made to forget. Now with the Trump Administration working to build more border walls and detention prisons, I think about my family and ancestors and how the border crossed us. I think about how land, culture and language was taken from a people, a generation, and a community. What can we learn from that history and what power and wisdom can we harness as a people?
War, Borders and Occupation
The border between the US and Mexico was won through war with Mexico, and before that the land was colonized and taken by Spain. Communities were devastated and cultures destroyed. The U.S. took the land from Mexico through war in 1848 and the border crossed many people living on the land. The US then deported US Mexican American citizens, took land through land grabs and continued to colonize and erase indigenous claims to land.
In her book Border Lands, Gloria Anzaldua wrote- “the border fence that divides the Mexican people was born on Feb 2 1848 with the singing of the Treaty of Guatalupe-Hidalgo.” This treaty left 100,000 Mexican citizens seized by conquest and their rights and land ownership not honored. “The land established by treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soon swindled from its owners.” [i]
In Pofessor Kim Chambonpin’s 2005 article, How the Border Crossed Us, she dives in to the forgotten history of land grabs and land dispossession initiatives in California after the war with Mexico. In her article she outlines how the US purposely designed land grab statutes to take land away from Mexican American people in California and deprive them of due process and legal equality. [ii]
Why we should frame political discussions about immigration and the southern border of the US from a lens of occupation and war.
The United States is a capitalistic nation that thrives off wealth, investment and capitol. Land is one of the most wealth accruing resources that people can own, and it is essential that the discourse of immigration include how the borders were drawn and who’s land we are on. To erase a war and a people is the signature of occupation, colonialism and oppression. If progressives in the US want to be true to the story of the US-Mexico border and not erase a people and a history, they need to include the history of war, colonization and occupation.
This history isn’t talked about, nor is the irony of barring entry and deporting people whose ancestors may have lived in the US for generations before it was the US. Why isn’t the immigration debate talked about and framed from an occupation or a right to return perspective? Until there are answers to these questions, all I can offer is a call to remember the forgotten war and a forgotten people. This might help come up with answers to questions that seem unanswerable.
[i]Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza P. 19 (1987).
[ii]Kim, How the Border Crossed Us: Filling the Gap Between Plume v. Seward and the Dispossession of Mexican Landowners in California After 1848, 52 Cleve. St. L. Rev. 297 (2005).
See also-
Latina/o identity within thecontext of U.S. Latina/o Legal History: Mexico/U.S. Relations and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Puerto Rico and the treaty of Paris (1898)
Delgado, Perea, Stefanic, Latinos and the Law, War and Annexation, pages 1–30 and 49–79.
